People who work there seem to be happy and loyal, many of the them being there for 25, 40 years. Company does try to improve with continuous improvement, process improvement, questioning current process to find ways to be better. Benefits are great, comparable to most large companies. There is always training available (computer, soft skills, etc.).

Cons

Depending on the department you work it, there can be work/life balance issues, but this is also an area that is being improved on.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Learn to do your employees' jobs and sit in their open space some of the time. The productive employees will welcome it, and the not-so-productive ones won't, so you might learn who's who.

Great benefits, good place to build experience in energy industry, at the bottom level, before moving onward and upward.

Cons

Nobody is held accountable for doing their job, and the premium is placed on who likes whom, or whether or not they want to work with someone. Guess what folks? I don't care who you want to work with. Go do the job I pay you to do. Management doesn't hold anyone accountable for anything.

Also, because the pension benefits are so good, no one leaves, so don't plan on getting promoted beyond senior individual contributor for AT LEAST 10 years. That is not exaggerating either.

Also, if you are not an electrical engineer, you are not paid to market. They pay the EE's what they are worth, but for example I did the same job as another set of employees in a different area of the company where they were required to be EE's and our salary band was 20-30K lower. HR mis-categorizes job classifications, and doesn't recognize that while a position may look like a glorified accountant, it is actually closer to engineering. They don't review it that way, and as such there are many people across the company, who are underpaid.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

First, PG&E will have to take a $4.5B hit to the balance sheet as a result of the event on its San Bruno transmission asset, which PG&E has acknowledged was not maintained sufficiently to prevent the catastrophe. There are several reasons for that, but one I would like to highlight has been that PG&E has allowed a culture where not rocking the boat has been favored, over holding people accountable. That is, likability and politics has trumped actually holding people accountable for doing their job. The premium is placed on pleasing the right people, instead of delivering results, regardless of who likes whom. This nonsense is pervasive throughout PG&E, as a company. Now, it is time to pay the piper, for the lack of foresight in the approach PG&E has taken to its culture (i.e. letting personality trump results).

While sustaining this $4.5B balance sheet impact, it will be harder to access capital for PG&E, in 2015. Given the expected interest rate hikes to be issued by the FED, PG&E will find it harder to gain access to capital, as investors allocated their funds out of PG&E equities, and into assets paying a higher return, with less risk than a utility – certain bond instruments fit this profile quite well. Since PG&E will finance the $4.5B through equity, the shareholder will be diluted to a larger extent than if the hit were to take place in a low interest rate environment, which is what we have enjoyed since 2008. However, investors expect the FED to raise rates significantly, this year. The scenario for PG&E that is about to materialize could very well push it into bankruptcy. That is a real threat, for PG&E, right now. As such, now sounds like a good time to short PG&E.

I have been working at Pacific Gas and Electric full-time (more than 10 years)

Pros

Benefits are great in PGE; work life balance is tremendous.

Cons

Lower mgnt gangs up ... don't listen to staff's inputs, instead, they cover each other's lackings. The dept manager did collect feed back from most staff about the incompentent supervisor, and the feedbacks are mostly negative....but he covers up and plans not reporting the negative feedback because he doesn't want to "rock the boat".

The supervisor continues to be incompetent, harassing employees, taking employees credits, not defending employees for their work...not taking accountability, relying her buddy contractor to do the work for her, and constantly allowing losses of responsibilities to other dept, allowing middle mgnt to critique how less value added our org has been without aggressively proving that we are not and defending it.

These lower mgnt are weak; they do not realize by not rocking the boat, they can loss staff, loss reputations, eventually they will loss their functions and their job. They care their yearly bonuses and raises at the sensitive performance review timing of the year. They grade pp intentionally based on their preferences and prefers pp who won't complain.

This is the culture of pge and every dysfunctional company. That is why the company has to be fined. They'll keep doing it until someday the company exploded or bankrupted again. And these pp have no shame, as by then, all they do is blame the company and claim no responsibility to the failure.

Pge is ridiculous to allow these pp to exist. These lower mgnt are greedy, manipulative, dysfunctional, and do not contribute much values to the culture that is needed by pge. Their salary combined are more than 300k and they are lower middle mgnt only.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

CEO level needs to have a special taskforce to look into these personnel issues - so that they can evaluate, trimming company's costs and increasing effectiveness to do some real clean up.

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